His One Woman

by Paula Marshall

Before she slept—and sleep was long in coming—she wondered not only where Jack was now, but what he had been doing in the long months which had passed since she had last seen him. Did he still love her, as she undoubtedly still loved him?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Like Marietta, Jack was also remembering the past. Unlike her, he was still puzzled as to what had happened to their letters. Oh, the misery of remembering all those lovingly penned words which had never reached their intended recipient. He had to believe that what Aunt Percival had told him was true and that each of them had—wrongly—thought the other to be treacherous.

  He took his misery with him to the White House. Had it not been a part of his duties he knew he would not have gone there.

  The atmosphere at the reception that night was serious and subdued: the mad, hopeful ecstasy of the early days of the War had long gone, killed by death and battles lost, but the darker mood of the evening matched his own thoughts.

  ‘We’re a quiet lot tonight, Jack,’ remarked Ezra wryly, ‘especially you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack soberly. ‘I suppose there are many like me who are thinking of the dead. All wars have their dead, I know, but it means little until you have seen action.’

  ‘It had to be fought, though,’ said Ezra, who was a down-to-earth fellow, not given to much philosophising. So far as he was concerned, the war was a job to be done, like any other, and if there was benefit for him in doing it, so be it, it still had to be done.

  ‘Oh, I don’t deny its necessity,’ Jack said. ‘But you know that the South see it just as you do, as a holy war, and they’re the worst wars of all. When they’re beat, it will be a long time before they recover—or forget.’

  Ezra shrugged. ‘They wanted it,’ he said, ‘and they started it at Sumter.’ Jack did not contradict him, but even that thought did not comfort him.

  He was standing alone in an alcove, watching the chattering throng, when a woman’s voice behind him, echoing Ezra’s, said, ‘You’re quiet tonight, Jack.’

  He turned to see Sophie Hope—for a quick glance at her left hand told him that she was still unmarried. She was being squired by a bear of a man: fat, almost middle-aged, with a hard shrewd face. He was obviously one of the new breed of entrepreneurs who were doing well out of the war. Jack thought him to be a strange cavalier for Sophie.

  She smiled at him enticingly, but her youthful charm and her pink and white prettiness had faded in the two years since he had last seen her. His brother Alan had been prescient: she was growing fat and, given a few more years, she was like to become an old maid. Her once-soft mouth had a hard, petulant set to it.

  ‘Miss Sophie,’ he said politely, bowing a little. ‘I trust I see you well.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said, and looked at her escort patronisingly, making no attempt to introduce him to Jack. ‘Carver,’ she almost snapped at him, ‘pray fetch me an ice and do not trouble yourself to hurry back, I beg of you.’

  He reluctantly moved away to do her bidding while Sophie turned her faded charms on Jack.

  ‘He’s Carver Massingham,’ she told him carelessly. ‘Rich but a bore, and a boor as well,’ she finished dismissively. ‘Although he has his uses.’

  She was so patently telling Jack that she was free to accept his advances that Jack almost laughed. Instead, he said in as neutral a voice as possible, ‘For fetching and carrying ices, I suppose.’

  Her laughter at this—although she was not sure that Jack was making a joke—was consequently rather strained.

  ‘You look worried, Jack, not quite the man you were. Were you looking for Marietta—or the widow Grant, I ought to say. She rarely goes out in public these days—so unfortunate, Marietta.’ Her eyes glittered when she came out with her most cruel dart. ‘One way or another, she can’t seem to keep a man!’

  ‘Now, why should you think me worried?’ he countered, refusing to reply to her spite about Marietta. He was not minded to wear his heart on his sleeve for Sophie to peck at. She had become a hard and bitter woman: her sneer at Marietta was even harsher than those she had uttered before he had left Washington. ‘On the contrary, I am most happy to be here—and to be entertained.’

  His last sentence was a direct lie, but he thought that it was all that Sophie deserved.

  His coolness made Sophie savage. How dared he look at her as though she were some ugly specimen in a mad doctor’s study! Her desire to hurt him and to disparage Marietta suddenly outran her discretion.

  ‘No? You weren’t looking for Marietta, then? From all those letters you wrote to her from New York,’ she began unwisely, ‘I thought that— Jack! Whatever are you doing?’

  Her exclamation came out as a shrill scream of fear, for Jack’s face had changed dramatically on hearing her careless words and grasping their meaning. He thrust out a hand to grip her wrist so tightly that another cry of pain was wrenched from her. ‘Jack! Let go of my wrist! What do you think you’re doing?’

  Pleasant Jack Dilhorne’s expression was murderous. Sophie suddenly realised what she had unwittingly admitted. She stood, still and silent, her free hand suddenly over her betraying mouth, her own face grey.

  ‘Sophie,’ he said, his voice unrecognisable, ‘to what letters are you referring? And how came you to see them? Only this afternoon I learned that Marietta had never received a single one of mine. So how did you know about them?’ Jack’s voice never rose, but became so hard that it was unrecognisable. In manner and speech he had become a twin to his formidable brother Alan. He tightened his grip on Sophie’s wrist so strongly that she feared that he was about to break it.

  ‘Jack! Stop this at once. I don’t know what you are talking about. Let me go at once, d’you hear!’

  ‘No, Sophie. Not until you tell me how you knew that I wrote to Marietta when no one else did. What did you do with my letters, Sophie? Marietta, Aunt Percival and Asia never saw them, but you have just said that you did. So tell me, what happened to my letters which Marietta never received? And to hers which never reached me? Answer me, Sophie, or it will give me the greatest pleasure to wring your neck as well as break your wrist!’

  For one moment she met his hard stare and endured the pain his grasp was causing. Her head dropped, only to rise again, to show him her eyes, blazing and triumphant.

  ‘Oh, damn you, Jack Dilhorne! Here’s the truth and much pleasure may it give you! I burned them, all of them, and hers to you, so that you each thought that the other was faithless. I laughed when I watched them turn to ash. Why should that plain stick take all my beaux away from me and not pay for it? Even when I’d got rid of you, she had the impudence to rob me of Avory Grant and marry him.

  ‘And now you’re back, still mooning after her, I see. I’m glad I burned your letters. I’d do it again.’

  Unseen by either of them, Carver Massingham had returned with a small tray of ices to hear the greater part of what was being said. He had done nothing to betray his presence, but had watched and listened to them, his face avid, but his pleasure at seeing Sophie manhandled carefully suppressed.

  The berserker rage which Jack had never felt before and was never to feel again, and which, unknowingly, he shared with his dead father and his two elder brothers, had him in its grip. The world slowed to a stop, until all that it contained was Sophie’s white, hate-filled and triumphant face while she taunted him with her actions which had cost him Marietta, his peace of mind and two years of his life without the woman he loved, the woman whom he might, for all he knew, have permanently lost.

  Afterwards, he never knew how it was that he didn’t wring Sophie’s neck on the spot as he had threatened. His hands were reaching out to clutch it—and then the world started again when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  It was Carver Massingham, holding the tray of ices in one hand and, having heard all he wished to hear, touching Jack’s shoulder with the other to prevent him from doing the unforgivable.

  ‘I say, Dilhorne, what in the world do you think you’
re doing?’

  His coarse voice banished the berserker rage. Jack dropped his hands and stared at Sophie, whose scarlet wrist was beginning to bruise and to swell.

  ‘You,’ said Jack thickly, ‘you…you treacherous whore,’ and then to Carver, his face still avid when he heard this denunciation, ‘I wish you joy of her. Buy her a padlock for her tongue and cuffs for her hands when you marry her. You’ll need them.’

  ‘Damn you, sir,’ spluttered Carver, looking from one to the other and defending Sophie purely for form’s sake. ‘How dare you speak to a lady so?’ Underneath his apparent gallantry, however, he was thinking, So that’s the kind of thing the bitch is capable of getting up to, is it? Damn if I’ve not found just the hook to catch Miss Sophie with.

  ‘A lady?’ ground out Jack, looking around him, his expression still murderous. ‘What lady? I see no lady, sir. Merely some poor, white trash I believe you call it here.’

  ‘Damn you, sir,’ roared Carver again, still outwardly chivalrous. ‘You’ll answer to me for this, Dilhorne.’

  ‘Not I, sir,’ said Jack, at last becoming aware of the stares which the scene had drawn and was still drawing. ‘I’ve no wish to kill you over madame here. Ask her what she did with my letters to Marietta and hers to me, and then ban fires from your home if you’re stupid enough to marry her.’

  He turned to go, still shaking, the remains of the rage causing a physical nausea so strong that he felt like vomiting on the spot.

  Sophie’s face was ashen. She seized Carver by the arm when she thought that he was about to follow Jack—something which he had no intention of doing. His prime aim now was to deal with Sophie.

  ‘No, I beg of you, no,’ she gasped, not wishing him to learn what she had done, unaware that he had overheard most of what had passed between herself and Jack, and fearful that Jack might tell the whole room of it if he were further provoked.

  Carver stared at her. Melted ice was dripping on to the tray he carried.

  ‘What did he mean, Sophie, about his letters? Tell me?’ His voice was suddenly as cruel as it was when he was dealing with his business rivals.

  ‘Nonsense, oh, it’s nonsense,’ she replied swiftly, trying to placate him: his face had become as unpleasant as Jack’s had been. She was suddenly frightened of him—all her usual contemptuous treatment of him quite vanished. ‘I jilted him, that’s all. And now he’s trying to gain his revenge.’

  ‘Not what I heard,’ returned Carver. ‘If that was Jack Dilhorne, he left you for your plain cousin. The jilting, if any, was on his side. What did you do with his letters, Sophie? Burn them, to keep them away from the plain cousin? Is that what you did?’

  Mutely, she stared at him. It was hopeless to try to deceive him: his shrewdness was a byword.

  ‘Answer me, Sophie,’ he said, putting down the tray and trying to clean his hand with his handkerchief where the ice had dripped on to it.

  ‘Why should I?’ she asked sullenly. ‘It’s no business of yours.’

  ‘Did you burn them, Sophie? I will have an answer, you know.’

  ‘You will not, for I shall leave you,’ she said, defiance written on her face.

  For the second time that night her wrist was caught in a cruel grip.

  ‘No, Sophie, you will stay, and you will marry me whether you wish to or not. Otherwise I shall tell the whole world of what you did, and that would destroy you. There is not a decent person in Washington who would speak to you again. Thank your God that I am a vulgar swine who knows how to control a jealous virago.’

  ‘You would not,’ she panted. ‘You would not dare.’

  His cruel eyes raked her body and for the first time Sophie realised the temper of the man whom she had teased and taunted. She was trapped and knew it. She did not want him, no, not at all. She now knew how hard her life would be if she married him, but not to accept him meant that she would be ruined: and over Marietta! That was the hardest cross of all to bear.

  ‘You leave me no choice,’ she finally said.

  ‘I seldom give others any choice,’ was his response. ‘And when you are my wife you will behave yourself—or take the consequences.’

  He released her wrist. ‘Now we shall tell your parents that we are to be married; although they will not approve of me, they have never yet denied you anything—which is your downfall.

  ‘Look happy, my dear. You are going to be a bride at last. In order to gain a place in your world, a man has been foolish enough to marry an unattractive shrew with a fat backside. One further thing. If your cousin should ever ask you about her letters you will tell her the truth, apologise tearfully, and that will be the end of the matter. I know the Marietta Grants of this world: they have all the honour and decency which you and I do not share.’

  Sophie’s smile on hearing these coarse home truths was a rictus of dismay. She had given Carver Massingham his chance to trap her, and now she must pay. She walked with him over to her parents, her hand clasped loosely over her damaged wrist, and tried to hold her grimacing smile in place.

  The worst thing of all had happened, for now he was her cruel master who had pretended to be her humble slave.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jack could not sleep. The memory of the dislike on Aunt Percival’s face when she had seen him, and the glee on Sophie’s when she had taunted him with the destruction of his letters, prevented him sinking into the blessed oblivion where he could forget them.

  Sophie had made him appear to be the worst kind of exploitative swine, and he had no notion whether, when he sought her out in the morning, Marietta would even agree to meet someone whom she must regard as her treacherous seducer. To her, unaware of Sophie’s wicked behaviour, he was a man who had taken her to bed, made love to her, and then had callously abandoned her. It was enough to destroy any woman’s love. Would it even arise from the ashes when he confronted her with what Sophie had confessed to him and Carver Massingham?

  He could hardly wait for the new day to arrive when he could set off for Bethesda. He had asked Butler, before he left the Reception, to tell him exactly where the Hope Farm was, and how to get there.

  His face had been so ravaged that Ezra had looked at him queerly, saying, ‘It’s not really a farm any more. The Senator bought it for a summer home so that he needn’t spend the hot weather in Washington itself. It’s not a long ride.’ He gave Jack the directions he needed, while wondering what Sophie Hope could have said to distress him so profoundly.

  ‘Take my gig,’ he offered kindly. ‘It will be easier than riding.’

  Jack scarcely looked any better the next day. It was fine and sunny and he rose early, the marks of a sleepless night plain upon his face. All the way along the road which, once out of Washington, was little better than a track, he thought carefully of what he might say to Marietta. He wondered whether she would even believe him when he told her of Sophie’s wickedness. Would she be able to credit that, since he had loved her so dearly, the last two years had been a time of great suffering for him because he thought that he had lost her—or had never really had her, or her love?

  The one thing which worried him the most of all was that, even if she believed him, it was possible that she might have lost the love for him which had once moved her so powerfully that she had joyfully given herself to him on their last day together.

  After all, she had been Avory Grant’s wife, and he was still only eight months dead. Butler had told him that the marriage had been a happy one, and that since his death at Fredericksburg she had virtually retired from society. The night on which Jack had seen her was the first occasion on which she had attended a public event. Well, he could only try his best, and pray that God would be kind to him—and to her…

  When he arrived at the farmhouse there was no one to be seen. The place lay peaceful under the sun, like something lost and out of time. He felt his presence, and what he had come to tell them, to be nothing less than sacrilege.

  A black servant, not Asia, came to the
door. Oddly enough he seemed to be expected, for when he gave her his name and asked to see Mrs Grant, she immediately showed him into a big, airy room which looked out on to an idyllic view of fields, hills and trees: Marietta was not present.

  He paced the planked and polished floor nervously until the black servant entered and said, ‘Mrs Grant to see you, sir,’ before rapidly retreating—to be replaced by Marietta.

  It was a Marietta whom Jack had never seen before. All the careful, formal and staid attire which Senator Hope’s daughter and secretary had always chosen to wear was gone.

  Her lustrous hair was unbound; instead, it was tied loosely at the nape of her neck with a broad, cherry-coloured ribbon. The long sweep of it fell down her back. She was not wearing mourning, but was sporting a simple cream-coloured cotton dress, decorated with sprigs of flowers. A broad cherry-red sash circled her waist. The skirts of her dress were full and flowing since she wore no crinoline cage beneath them. Her slippers were also bright red. Over the dress was an apron of fine cream linen trimmed with lace.

  It was her face, though, which had changed the most. The severe air, which she had worn as an armour, had gone. Instead, her expression was soft and tranquil, with more than a trace of the humour which she had always possessed but had rarely revealed. Jack had forgotten her humour after experiencing the sober intensity of the women whom he had met in New York.

  Strangely, this belated, and unexpected, meeting reproduced the pattern of their first one, that long-ago day in Washington. Jack was standing at the window when Marietta entered, looking out at the meadows and the trees. He turned to greet her when she slowly advanced until she was immediately in front of him.

  He bowed—as did she—as though they were strangers newly come upon one another, and if Jack thought Marietta had changed, she thought that Jack had. He was more serious-looking, for one thing. There had still been something of the eager young boy about him when they had first met—and even when she had last seen him.